Chatbot

Creating Educational Technologies

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Week 5

Week 6

Week 7

Week 8

Week 9

Week 10

Week 11

Week 12

Chatbot

20% Contribution to your course grade

  • 5% Comprehension (degree of conversational errors)

  • 5% Engagement (use of conversational engagement techniques)

  • 5% Instructional (effectiveness in supporting stated learning outcomes)

  • 5% Bias (degree of training bias mitigation)

Portfolio item due Friday 9am Week 9

Your third assignment is to develop an Atificial Intelligence chatbot. You must use the botlibre tool to create your chatbot, and choose an educational approach you feel best enables you to meet the assessment criteria. Your chatbot should have at least 20 distinct responses and not more than 40,. You explanatory guide (including your chatbot responses) should be not more than 800 words.

You will be expected to:

  1. Develop an original educational chatbot that can comprehend student questions - this comprehension is determined by the richness of your pogrammed responses and the number of times a random response is required;

  2. Engage students - describing the various techniques you have used to draw students into conversations with your chabot;

  3. Instruct students - detailing how your chatbot supports the learning of a new concept or skill; and

  4. Mitigate bias - describing how you might incorporate strategies to reduce bias in your chatbot.

The tool you will be using to create your game is botlibre http://www.botlibre.org/ and while there are installable versions, you can also use it online.

Botlibre lets you create interactive text and voice based conversations, known as chatbots. Chatbots are commnly embedded in websites and social media platforms to simulate conversations and answer questions.

The botlibre is very simple to use and learn at the level expected, but the focus of your task is not just learning how to use this tool, it is in coming up with an educational conversational experience that can be used to teach students, and the more complex and deep this learning, the better.

There are many examples and resources on the botlibre website, but remember, you are creating an educational chatbot not just an interactive chabot. Your chabot should draw upon the theory of AI discussed in Week 7, the concept of Deep Learning and bias discussed in Week 8, and the AI application making techniques explored in Week 9 (though these will expand upon your work with botlibre into other aspects of artificial intelligence and the tools available, i.e. everything you need to complete the assignment will be available from Week 7 and 8, the tutorials and examples on the botlibre website, and the discussions held in tutorials and online.

While botlibre is quite powerful, your chatbot does not need to go beyond a text based conversational experience, but within this context there are opportunities to include educational elements, this is what you need to explore and use these elements to teach concepts in engaging and effective ways. As your Botlibre does not use Deep Learning processes, there will not be automated bias introduced, but you as the developer may introduce bias and your should detail how you have mitigated this.

It is not expected that you would need to exceed 40 responses to be able to demonstrate the conversations, engagement and educational potential of your chatbot i.e. it does not need to be comprehensive, but that which you do include and describe in your documentation, should meet the criteria.

You will submit a link to your botlibre chatbot (Link available under details on your Botlibre page). You will also be submitting a document of up to 800 words describing the educational aspects of your chatbot and the approach you have used, this should include example conversation logs from your chatbot that you can annotate to highlight your educational approach, the responses, greetings, keywords you have addded to your chatbot, and you should describe what measures you could consider to mitigate bias.

Botlibre Website https://www.botlibre.com/

Botlibre Documentation https://www.botlibre.com/manual.jsp https://www.botlibre.com/doc.jsp

Botlibre interactive tutorial https://www.botlibre.com/courses.jsp

To create your bot, create a Bot Libre account/sign up, choose create a new bot, name your bot, choose the basic_template (feel free to experiement with other templates, but for your assessable chat bot - use the basic_template, choose the Education csategory, do not make your bot private or hidden, then press 'create bot'. Chat with your bot, and when you are ready to start adding responses - exit the bot (icon) and go into the admin panel. (quick guide) From the admin panel you can see the Training & Chat Logs and add responses to key phrases and words, and edit the greetings you chatbot makes (training your bot). You can also make adjustments during conversations with your chatbot by ticking the learn box in the dropup menu (only visible when the bot cannot answer a question) and then you will see a submit correction icon (black circle with a white cross) that lets you add the response your bot should make. (and yes, you may change your chat bot avatar)